Event

High Rise

Red Renewal: Seattle's Socialist Spring

Apr 30

(Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil, 2009, 66 min)

Co-presented with ARCADE
Charles Mudede will introduce the screening, connecting the film's themes and ARCADE's spring issue feature, "After Growth: Rethinking the Narrative of Modernization"

Wednesday, Apr 30 at 07:00PM

In High-Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol), nine penthouse residents in three of Brazil's largest cities (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Recife) divulge what it's like to live at the top. Through revealing interviews with the residents, in the comfort of their high-rise lofts, director Gabriel Mascaro exposes a world of wealth gone wild.

The penthouse residents share sentiments that range from elitist to oblivious to bizarre: removed from reality by hundreds of feet of glass and steel, one woman remarks that the favela shanties below look like "little dollhouses." Another laughs, "We can talk to God more easily up here."

A contemplation of the neo-liberalization of space emerges from the (almost absurdly) humorous dis-junction between the decadent lifestyles on display, and the tumult of poverty and daily struggle below. High Rise ruminates on the role that architecture plays in the socioeconomic as well as physical scaffolding of human relations, as the social stratification of vast urban centers is crystallized through striking images of an upper class perched quite literally above the rest of the world.

Charles Mudede is guest editor of ARCADE's Spring 2014 issue After Growth: Rethinking the Narrative of Modernization.